Author Archives: oinsketta

Mixing unregulated capitalism with democracy causes trouble

Part One is here.

My embrace of democracy does not make my recent experiences with losing government-provided health insurance three times in the last eighteen months any less bitter. The first time my health insurance was cancelled, and I lost the corporate internal appeal at the insurance company, it turned out my insurance had been cancelled illegally.

An on-line complaint to the NYS Department of Finance resulted in the corporation instantly reversing its irreversible decision, restoring my health insurance. I even got an apology for their “mistake,” unlike the probably tens of thousands of others who lose their health insurance every year in the same “unappealable” scam all insurance companies routinely use to cull their lowest paying, most expensive customers.

The supremely maddening part of that first gratuitous fucking is that, even as a long-time lawyer who spent weeks in research, speaking and writing to every expert in the state and federal bureaucracy, I was unable (as was every expert) to find the law the company had clearly violated. Not part of the “Patient Protection (and Affordable Care) Act”. Not discoverable in New York State Insurance Law or in any administrative code. Makes me angry just thinking about it now. No agency I spoke to was even aware of the existence (let alone amazing efficiency) of the Department of Finance online complaint form [1].

If a law that protects a low-income Americans from the illegal act of a corporation providing affordable health care, under the Patient Protection Act, cannot be found, even by determined lawyers, there is no fucking law.

The opacity and unfariness of that burns me to this day, even as a learned, well-meaning former friend kept assuring me I was wrong to be so angry, that I should just be happy I got lucky and saved my own healthcare. As for those with limited English proficiency, struggling to get by, who’d had their ACA insurance illegally cancelled in this manner? Fuck ’em, not your problem, pal (spoken by this dick head like the Great Communicator himself).

The second time my insurance was abruptly terminated (during the second month of the pandemic, which raged uncontrolled in NYC), it was a matter of one document I’d “failed” to upload to a website in a timely manner. There was no actual notice to me of this failure, or its hard consequence, (and fixing it on-line took about three minutes, once I knew about it), my insurance was legally cancelled, according to New York State Law, for my failure to timely provide the document I wasn’t told needed to be provided.

During the window of time we are required to re-apply for ACA insurance in NYS this tax document is not yet available. A reminder email would have been nice (and I had numerous survey emails from this same agency), but is apparently not required under unappealable NYS law. Although NYS informed my insurance company of this fatal failure of mine, with enough time for me to fix the problem, neither entity had any obligation to inform me that my insurance was in jeopardy, until after it was irrevocably cancelled. This time there was no appeal, I had to wait a month to be insured again, trying not to inhale too deeply any time I left the house.

Then we have Medicare, the Great Society program that is the American gold standard for health insurance. “Medicare for All”, is the rallying cry of liberals and socialists alike. I recently turned 65 and learned, over the course of several months, how complicated the public-private Medicare partnership actually is. Do this first or irrevocably lose the right to that, and so forth.

Accepted by virtually all doctors and hospitals, Medicare leaves a potentially gigantic bill for the patient to pay, as 20% of medical visits is not covered. One can, of course, spend thousands a year on private insurance “Medicare Advantage” (there are many plans of all different prices in our “Free Market”), to avoid these possibly huge bills falling on the old person who gets sick. Medicare is infinitely better than no Medicare, but, again, complex and not without tremendous problems, at least based on my initial experiences.

Fortunately, the law gives a person six months, three before the 65th birthday and three after, to learn about this complicated program and sign up (though you will get no communication from Medicare itself and Medicare itself cannot help you in any way until you are officially on Medicare). I was finally able to speak to a knowledgeable volunteer (at the NYC Department for the Aging) who spent over an hour warning me of pitfalls and giving me important information. She found me a prescription drug plan for $8 a month (or something like that) among many that are ten times or more that price. You see, that’s part of our freedom here in the USA — the right to choose!

Two weeks before my 65th birthday I got a notice from my insurance company informing me that ACA insurance ends when you turn 65. Goodbye three month window to apply for Medicare after you turn 65, you will be uninsured until you apply and get approved for Medicare.

Here my beef is not as much with “government” (a legal requirement for actual notice, with enough time to act before your health plan is terminated, would be good) as with how thoroughly corporate “culture” has affected the workings of government. This adoption of corporate practices stems from the idiotic and frequently disproven 40 year myth about the superiority of “private enterprise” over “government”, a big talking point of right-wingers like Louie DeJoy and other “Free Market” defenders.

Part of corporate culture is the thorough segmentation of the “corporate brain” such that one side of it cannot communicate with the other. You cannot get information you need from the consumer side, because they have no way to interact with the provider side — which can answer the question– for example.

We also now commonly see “third parties” with contracts to do government work, like collecting debt, sending bills, providing “notice” and so forth. If I requested something a month ago that is typically available in five business days, and call weeks later to find out the status, I am as likely to get a bored, underpaid, bitter “third party” subcontractor giving me a surly answer pulled directly from his ass as I am to talk to a well-informed government agent ready, willing and able to solve my problem.

In the case of Medicare, I was assured when I applied on June 17 (after a ten business day delay to get a new PIN sent to me by US Mail when I was unable to log-in) that everything was in order, that my application would be approved within two weeks or so and that my Medicare, whenever officially granted, would be effective July 1.

You can’t reach anyone on the phone to find out why it is now three weeks later and the website shows the same 2/3 on the status bar. You read that your application is in process, but there has been no discernible movement in three weeks.

For most people, you read, this review takes 2 to 4 weeks. For you, asshole? Hah!

The first three times you call you are subjected to an endless loop of “Thank you for holding. We appreciate your patience, we’re currently assisting other people and will help you as soon as we possibly can.” The loop about helping you plays until your call is eventually cut off. This is a universal corporate trick that enhances the bottom line, why hire extra workers to answer phones when you can simply play this recorded loop until the call is automatically terminated?

My fourth call was the charm, I was connected to a woman who assured me I simply had to wait, everything was in order, everything that could be done was being done. The Social Security Administration website continued to tell another story.

My next call, a few days later, also got through, this time the guy impatiently told me to forget what the website said, the review ALWAYS takes 60 to 90 days to complete and I’m only slowing it down by trying to call all the time. And, yes, the recording says that if your need is crucial you can schedule a face-to-face meeting (NYC branches of federal government offices are apparently still closed for the pandemic), but merely being uninsured does not qualify as crucial and there are no face-to-face meetings because … Covid. You just have to be patient, asshole.

My next couple of calls put me in that endless loop of thanking me for my patience and eventually disconnecting my call. When I got through next, just the other day, Ms. Estevez was very helpful. The guy who told me 60 to 90 days? He had no idea what he was talking about, he was completely wrong, said Ms. Estevez with great disgust. She looked over my stalled application, found no reason it was being held up. Approved it on the spot.

The next day, with only two or three hours of work, I was able to get my Medicare ID number read to me over the phone. Now, the only things I have to worry about is getting this cancer scare checked out before September, and how much 20% of my doctor’s bill will be (it will certainly be far less than the full retail $885, excluding tests, I was scheduled to pay “out of pocket” in September).

Say it with me, boys and girls:

USA! USA!!!

[1]

I received a notice from the Department of Finance, after my complaint was successfully resolved by their intervention, that my low-cost health insurance did not allow me to use the Department of Finance’s website, that I’d have to lodge any future complaints with Andrew Cuomo’s incompetent political appointee at Medicaid (also in charge of all ACA programs in NYS). Medicaid’s website contains no on-line form, you have to wait for someone who can help you, possibly, to pick up the phone there, you indigent piece of shit.

Note: this letter from the Department of Finance did not stop them from filing my next online complaint against the insurance company, though that one led to nothing, as current New York State law required.

Excellent summary of GOP policy positions

I don’t recall where I saw this, so I can’t give credit or link you to its source, but I have to commend whoever put it together for providing a hard to refute synopsis of the GOP platform, with just a couple of omissions — taxing vast wealth is a sin against Jesus Christ Himself, Climate Catastrophe, like Fauci-Ouchi’s totally fake COVID-19 HOAX, is a Communist false flag operation designed to kill the JOB CREATORS and give a pretext for freedom haters from the tyrannical federal government to go door to door castrating the population.

With the benefit of hindsight

Sometimes it is impossible to see a thing clearly, if you you feel a certain way about it, until you can look at it with the benefit of hindsight. Something you had no way to understand as significant when it happened can become clear as part of a pattern you can only see looking back. A seemingly small thing you didn’t see as any kind of problem can come into focus as an important clue to what went wrong, once the entire situation is in the past tense.

I used to be good friends with a cheerful madman, hospitalized periodically for bouts of mania, who inflicted terrible, fatal damage on his old friend’s beautiful Gibson ES-335 (BB King’s Lucille was an ES-335). The lovely guitar, a pleasure to play, had its F-holes gouged out with a file, its mellow Humbucker pickups pried out, it’s perfectly formed, smooth mahogany colored hollow body partially bashed in. The neck was violently pried off, splintering some more great wood. Its remains were then left floating in a bathtub full of soapy water covered with hair the nut had maniacally clipped from his partially shaved head. The guy in the guitar shop just shook his head sadly when he saw the brutality of what had been done to this wonderful instrument. He pronounced it dead.

With hindsight I came to understand how deep my friend’s reservoir of rage was, but that was a lesson I’d learn much later. As for the guitar he destroyed, I knew the back story right away. It makes no sense in the cold light of pure Reason, but I understood part of the rage that made the gleeful desecration seem momentarily justified to my out of control friend. The occasionally crazed man was a fairly good musician who could sometimes come up with cool parts for the songs of his friend the songwriter. He often added inventive keyboard parts that greatly enhanced his friend’s songs. The songwriter always viewed his friend as a side kick, his loyal accompanist. The songwriter, like Lennon and McCartney before him (when they gave Harrison no credit for his many great arrangement ideas and melodic contributions, like the brilliant, soulful song-making opening riff in “And I Love Her”) never gave him any songwriting credit. It wore on him over the years. Finally in a bout of mania he fucked up the guy’s expensive, vintage guitar (this guy I’m talking about, not George Harrison).

Footnote: credit or no credit was purely academic since not one of the songwriter’s songs was ever published, let alone performed and monetized. As a sign of respect and friendship, the songwriter would have been well advised to give some credit to his friend for his major help on a bunch of his tunes. Particularly in light of how things ended for that beautiful guitar, and their long friendship.

I had a friend, since Junior High School, who became a locally well-known lawyer. He explained to me, when we were adolescents, that he had to work hard in school, to graduate at the top of his class, to maximize his chances for getting into a top school that would be a ticket to professional success and ultimate happiness. His vision of success, he explained (as I smoked a joint he would no longer share — he had extra credit homework to complete), was coming home every night to a beautiful home where his beautiful wife would hand him a perfect drink as he relaxed, admiring his sunset view, as the final touches were put on his gourmet dinner. It struck me as a shallow vision of the good life, even at fourteen, but who the hell was I to judge? To each his own, or as we learned to say in our Junior High School French class “a chacun son gout“.

He worked hard, graduated at the top of his specialized high school class, went on to Harvard and then Columbia for his law degree. He got a highly paid job at a prestigious law firm which involved, among other things, defending toxic polluters against lawsuits from tree huggers. After a relatively short time, he changed sides. He took the litigation skills he developed at that corporate law firm and, taking a big cut in pay, went to work defending the environment as the lead lawyer in a branch office of The Earth’s Law Firm, fighting the same powerful world destroying scoundrels he used to represent. This move was the right thing to do, and as far as I know, he never regretted making it.

We remained close friends over the years. He didn’t like to talk about personal troubles of his own very often, feeling that the world is a bitter enough place without adding his complaints to the conversation. He seemingly enjoyed talking about my personal troubles, though, probing for the intimate details, playing devil’s advocate to show me that, arguably, the person I was having trouble with no doubt saw me as the culpable asshole, and not without reasons, which he would lay out and I would counter. I took all this in the spirit of what I thought of as friendship, in accordance with the emotional limitations of what this unhappy, critical old friend was capable of giving.

Until one day not long ago, when he called me in agitation, to challenge me about strong feelings I’d expressed to him in an email. He was very concerned, he said, that I seemed to be so disproportionately angry about a relatively small thing that had happened to me (the illegal termination of my ACA health insurance in January 2020). He was angry, in fact, that I seemed so irrationally angry, and was worried that I was going to kill myself with unhealthy rage. It appeared to him that I was full of destructive self-pity, seeing myself as the only person fucked by a giant fucking machine he was up against every minute of his life, as was everybody else. He eventually challenged me to tell him to go fuck himself. I declined, which, in hindsight was a mistake. Within a few months, after a lot of futile effort to avoid it, I essentially had to tell him that anyway.

But here’s the thing that hit me so clearly, looking at it in hindsight the other day, out of the blue, as I kept a steady pulse with a few simple chords on my guitar. I’d visited him at his new girlfriend’s house in California. He had two nice guitars and I began playing a steady, easy to improvise to rhythm part on one guitar. He began soloing over the simple changes on the other guitar. His girlfriend passed by with a big smile, commenting on how good we sounded. I played rhythm guitar behind him for the whole time we played together. The sound of a few notes in harmony, placed just right against the beat, and keeping the pulse steady as a heartbeat is the soul of guitar playing, to many of us. I never mind playing accompaniment behind a singer or another instrumentalist.

We’d both been playing since we were fourteen, he’d started a bit before me. He had been a hardworking lawyer while I’d spent those same working years, as a lawyer, working as little as possible, mostly as a low-paid court appointed piss boy, and before that, a teacher. I see now the great advantage I’d had over the years in the music department, because I loved guitar I’d spent countless hours of my life of leisure learning to play it. In his busy life of great responsibility, with much less time to play, he focused on mastering scales and modes, to solo. His soloing sounded pretty good.

After an hour or so I asked him to play a three or four chord vamp, so I could show him a bit of Gypsy guitar I’d learned. He said he couldn’t do it. The chords were simple, I don’t know what his reason was, but I didn’t press the matter. When it came up later, I told him it was fine, I’d had fun accompanying him, he sounded good.

Now, in the cool light of hindsight, this odd refusal to do a simple thing makes a certain amount of sense. Since reading the fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant together in ninth grade French class, my hardworking friend often referred to himself as the Ant, while I was, clearly, the Grasshopper. In this morality play the Grasshopper played violin all the time and wanted nothing to do with his fretful friend the Ant’s constant neurotic reminders that winter was coming and that he’d better start gathering food for those long cold months. The Grasshopper mocked the Ant, played some fancy violin, and the Ant furrowed his brow and went back to work. When winter came, and food became scarce, the Grasshopper, starving, finally swallowed his pride and went to ask his friend the Ant for food. The Ant, who had worked his ass off and had no time to “enjoy” life in the reckless manner of the self-indulgent Grasshopper he had tried to warn, tells the Grasshopper to fuck off. The Grasshopper starves to death. FIN.

In that context, my friend’s anger at my anger is as understandable as his claim that he couldn’t play a D, G7 and C chord, the chords every guitar player learns in the first week of playing. He has always been a competitive man, number 26 in his highly competitive graduating class in HS, degrees from two top Ivy League schools. I have always been an under-achiever, trying my best to gain insight and become a better person. To him, as to many ambitious people, achievement and success are the only measures of self-worth, and trying to become a “better person” is an illusory pursuit, a foolish exercise in self-deception. To me, doing what I love as well as I can and treating myself and the people I care about gently seem to be my top two loser priorities.

So, picture this — he’s playing live music, with a friend who plays a steady vamp that is open and easy to improvise to, and his girlfriend loves it. Why would he start playing possibly shaky rhythm guitar, which he hasn’t spent decades perfecting and polishing (as the fucking Grasshopper, in his life of infinite leisure, has) so that his shiftless friend can start improvising in a way that could, possibly, make him look bad? It’s lose/lose for him. So he simply says “I can’t do that.”

Seen in this new light I’m tempted to drop my old friend a line, tell him concisely how contemptible and ultimately self-destructive his reflexive competitiveness is, using this petty but telling example of his inability to play three simple chords for two minutes. I’d follow up with a couple of choice politically incorrect insults from our adolescence characterizing the unfair, childishly insecure type who is afraid, in front of his girlfriend and the best friend he ever had (“I love you like a brother”) of “looking bad” somehow — or worse, letting his unworthy friend look good. Because, as every successful person knows, playing music is actually about proving your dominance over the other players…

Funny, in the moment, most of us tend to let these kind of things slip by, in the spirit of not sweating the small stuff, not making a friend uncomfortable for no reason. Those of us who are not, by nature and long habit, carping, argumentative, super-competitive douche bags (his favorite phrase for worms, from back in the day), at any rate.

In Defense of our Flawed Democracy

Thank you for holding. We appreciate your patience, we’re currently assisting other people and will help you as soon as we possibly can.

(repeated every 40 seconds, at 7 minutes into a short loop of insipid hold muzak with the Social Security Administration, at 16 minutes and finally, one last time, at 26 minutes, when I belatedly pulled the plug on holding for these lying, pseudo-corporate bureaucrat pricks)

Theoretically the American people are the government and the government is intended to work for us (particularly if we are in the social class for whom the benefits of life, liberty and the pursuit of whatever were guaranteed by our Founders). The experiment in democracy these wealthy white men designed in the waning decades of the Eighteenth century was revolutionary, at the time every other place on earth was ruled by a monarch who sat on the throne by Divine Right (compare: Manifest Destiny). Anyone who questioned why God would put a vicious inbred hereditary imbecile on the throne could be considered a blasphemer and subjected to the usual time-honored remedies for this sort of impiety (not to mention treason).

The Founding Fathers risked their lives, committed open treason against the world’s most powerful king, to change a system that placed a king’s arbitrary will over all of them, giving them little or no say in the conditions of their own lives. “No taxation without representation” was a rallying cry of the colonists, since there was, by then, a bicameral representative council in England below the king (House of Lords and House of powerless fucking chumps) that had a say in government policy.

It was the radical idea of representative government, based on the radical notion of the right to self-determination, that gave rise to all sorts of radical ideas (including representative democracy) during the Age of Enlightenment when discerning minds began to use Reason to question long held beliefs, practices, customs and superstitions.

We’ve come full circle, in many parts of the world, to the pre-Enlightenment vision of religious faith in an all-powerful individual leader, chosen as part of an unknowable God’s all-loving, all-knowing plan, a “strongman” who exercises unlimited personal power paternalistically, to ensure what he deems is in the best interest of citizens. Thus, even in our democracy, you can have a mentally-ill sadist, ordained by God, doing what he needs to do to rid us of hated enemies and promote his loyal followers to head every important government office to advance his vision of truth, justice and the American way.

In the US that includes, obviously, the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the US Postal Service, the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, etc. If that leader surfs to power on a wave of churning emotion, exploiting fear and hatred of an unfair, corrupt, inefficient, abusive government, well, the more unfair, corrupt, inefficient and abusive his government is, the more it proves the point that he’s the only person who can save us! Don’t worry about the argument making sense, it doesn’t need to. It just needs to keep making you angry as hell.

So we have “debates” in our deadlocked, non-functioning Congress about things like increasing the budget for IRS enforcement against wealthy tax cheats (to pay for programs to literally begin trying to save the world from accelerating climate catastrophe). Is it American, patriotic, decent, honest, to cheat on your taxes? Here is the opposition party’s position in the debate:

WHO ARE YOU TO FUCKING SAY??!!! FUCK YOU, WASSHOLE! TRYING TO TAX THE RICH, THE JOB CREATORS, IS PUNISHING SUCCESS, JUST COMMUNISM, RADICAL ANTI-FASCISM or FACISM, TAKE YOUR PICK!!!

This is literally the quality of political “debate” in a nation run by, and for the benefit of, sociopaths and unprincipled careerists. Here’s a great snarky take on that from Sarah Lazarus at Crooked Media:

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) confirmed this week that he plans to investigate Donald Trump as part of the probe, and is prepared to depose senior Trump administration officials and members of Congress who might have played a role in the insurrection—like, say, the two seditionist Jims that McCarthy tried to put on the other side of the table. Thompson also indicated that the committee is very interested in learning more about McCarthy’s panicky phone call to Trump as the attack unfolded, which probably has nothing to do with McCarthy’s panicky efforts to thwart the investigation.

Nothing to fucking see here! You’d do the same if you had supported a maniac’s insane right to send a mob to the Capitol to violently stop the constitutionally mandated certification of an election he honestly refused to accept that he lost since he is history’s greatest winner. You’d do the exact same fucking thing if you were in McCarthy’s position!!!! Repeat everything you’re told to say and pretend you love the taste of the delusional Big Guy’s crusty hindquarters.

Anyway, I believe in government, in spite of the sickening frailties of the one we have now. Democracy is better than any alternative form of government, but we need to fix ours. Several radical, common sense reforms will be needed to restore our experiment in democracy to a representative government.

No more dark money in politics (at least say your fucking name, Charles, Rupert, Robert Mercer) funding the most extreme reactionary candidates in primaries to ensure the extremist political outcomes the 1% desires (part of the proffered protection of the public in the disastrous Citizens United ruling was that unlimited funding of political campaigns would be done transparently, a transparent bit of purely transactional bullshit, as it turned out).

No more right-wing fraternity vetting and choosing lifetime federal court judges to rule, whenever legally possible, according to that fraternity’s stated far right ideology. No more (currently entirely permissible, per 6-3 Supreme Court) partisan gerrymandering and no more restrictive, partisan voting laws — whether or not “race” is intentionally implicated in these moves (the Supreme Court’s brand new standard for overturning voter suppression laws, opponents have to prove they were intended to be deliberately racist, whatever the actual impact of the on different “races” the law causes).

The Supreme Court, a 6-3 right wing juggernaut whose majority was appointed by two presidents who lost the popular vote, straight from the Federalist Fraternity’s list, must be balanced with a handful of even-handed, non-“ideological” judges. Abolish the fucking Electoral College, that vestige of slavery, while we’re at it.

Everyone who works deserves a living wage, $7.25/hr, current federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2008, adjusted for inflation (since it was instituted) it should be $24/hr. Giant corporations must not be allowed to pay workers so poorly they qualify for Medicaid, health insurance for indigents. Taxes on vast, untaxable hereditary wealth and massive corporate windfall profits could go a long way to paying for vitally important programs we needed to have started decades ago, including the preservation of a habitable planet.

There’s a pretty short list of the essential things that are broken, and need to be fixed.

So I don’t write this in any way to attack our need for government programs and agencies that help our fellow citizens. We need those things that only a determined, responsive, well-functioning federal government can do. Think of the immediate improvement in American vaccination under a new president who didn’t regard the pandemic as a Communist/BLM-antifa hoax engineered to personally hurt him. Another example: the federal government took its time about it, to be sure, but in the end it was the intervention of the federal government, enforcing federal law, that ended the custom of lynching in many parts of the country that were determined to uphold this hateful tradition. FEMA is who you call when a killer storm destroys your town. Protection of voters’ rights in federal elections also falls to the federal government, under the 14th Amendment, and so forth.

Here are a few basic human needs the federal government has to attend to in a democracy, none of which seem controversial to me:

Disabled people should get help from the government. Children should not be subjected to malnutrition and the other ravages of poverty. Decent health care should be a right of citizenship, Americans should not have to die for lack of health “insurance”. Workers should be able to afford a place to live, food, clothing, days off, a bit of security. People who retire should be able to live in dignity and at least modest comfort. All citizens should have easy access to voting. Victims of killer storms should be rescued, helped to rebuild their lives. Corporations should be prevented from poisoning the water, air and ground. None of this is controversial, until you get down to the details, which are dictated by the agenda of a tiny, powerful elite of the hereditary super-wealthy, a group that has other priorities.

For example, if a law that protects a low-income Americans from the illegal act of a corporation providing affordable health care, under the Patient Protection Act, cannot be found, even by determined lawyers, there is no fucking law.

Details HERE

Biden Derangement Syndrome

I got a nice collection of political cartoons emailed to me by a friend in Tennessee. She picked some good ones, every one of them hit the current ugliness right on the nose. I thought of another cartoon the cartoonists should be working on about now.

There is a reason millions of Americans felt sick when the DNC orchestrated Biden’s nomination by jockeying him into the front-runner position as all the other “moderates” bowed out of the primaries on the same day, on the eve of that big primary when Biden sprung from the back of the pack to become a contender and then the DNC-chosen candidate.  Many of us felt, at the time, that with literal Nazis and Klansmen literally howling at the gates, and after the vast amount of damage their deranged leader had done in a mere four years to create “American carnage”, the smiling, compromising, moderate who couldn’t muster an apology for Anita Hill or a hint of regret for any of his many bad acts during a long career in the Senate, was not the one to be standing up for democracy, particularly against an irrational and violent movement led by an insane and sadistic narcissist whose constant lies are promulgated to tens of millions of credulous followers by a well-oiled mass media disinformation machine.

Sarah Lazarus at Crooked Media reported a sickening item last night that I hadn’t seen, instantly giving rise to that all-too familiar DNC-induced existential nausea:  

  • Democrats aren’t ready to boldly counter all forms of GOP obstruction just yet. During a CNN town hall on Wednesday night, President Biden said that as much as the filibuster sucks ass (paraphrasing), eliminating it entirely would “throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done.” (You know, by contrast to the relentless legislative juggernaut we have now.) On the bright side, Biden did voice his strong support for a return to a talking filibuster, and said he might be willing to go further if the filibuster causes total gridlock. (The For The People Act would like a word.)

Seriously, the president doesn’t yet understand what he’s up against?   How is it possible?  He doesn’t understand that the filibuster was a tool of slaveholders and then the Klan, almost exclusively?   And that McConnell took the trusty flintlock pistol of the filibuster, which at least required the effort of standing there and pulling the trigger, and transformed it into an email nuke that any one of his minions can deploy any time, while lying on their couch drinking vodka, to block debate on anything– permanently.

Silver lining? There’s a good cartoon in that quote, the Capitol in flames behind him, Confederate flags and swastikas all over it, Biden, in a gas mask, surrounded by panicked looking Secret Service “ending the filibuster would throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done.”

Vug him and the “moderate” corporate, status quo-committed whores he rode in on…

USA!   USA!!!

Y’all know this

On January 13, of course, [Kevin] McCarthy said: “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action by [Trump] to accept his share of responsibility.”

Now, six months later, Republicans have lined up behind the former president and are seeking to sabotage the investigation into the January 6 insurrection, clearly unhappy about what that investigation will reveal. 

source

Shoot, your party would do the same damn thing if the news was so ugly for yuh!

And the Lord slew him, also

The Bible is full of great, if sometimes divinely ambiguous, passages. Somewhere in the Book of Leviticus (chapter 26) God tells His People about the blessings He will bestow on them if they heed His commandments. He does this in a full paragraph of generous promises. In the next few pages He details the escalating curses He will afflict them with if they disobey His commands. In the end their great-great-grandchildren are eating their own children and fleeing in terror from the rustling of a leaf on a tree [1]. Great stuff from the All-Merciful.

Perhaps my favorite short bit is the brief story of Onan. Onan is known in polite society as the father of onanism, which is Victorian slang for masturbation [2]. It is not recorded that he actually did the solitary, self-pleasuring for which Victorian children were severely punished. Onan, every Bible reader knows, practiced coitus interruptus, as detailed in Genesis 38:9.

The story is that Onan’s older brother died and Onan’s father instructed him to do his duty to his brother, impregnate his widow, as the law demanded, and raise up seed to his brother’s name. This would allow the baby of the eldest son to inherit all of his grandfather’s property when the old man died, cutting Onan out of the inheritance entirely. Onan went to do his duty, had second thoughts, pulled out, spilling his seed on the ground. He apparently got in the habit of doing this, as Er’s widow, Tamar was not getting pregnant in spite of his many conjugal visits. Then, my favorite bit:

And what Onan did was hateful in the sight of the Lord and the Lord slew him, also.

Also!

Meaning, one assumes, that the Lord had slain Onan’s older brother, for some wickedness not reported in the Bible.

I am not a faithful or careful reader of the Old Testament, am only fleetingly acquainted with the New Testament. Of course, the fault here is my sloppy reading. The Holy One, blessed be He, didn’t spring this as a mischievous surprise, a punchline, the way I did, He carefully explained everything in Genesis 38:8, writing in His customary third person:

…6 Now Judah acquired a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. 7 But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the LORD; so the LORD put him to death. 8 Then Judah said to Onan, “Sleep with your brother’s wife. Perform your duty as her brother-in-law and raise up offspring for your brother.”…

Genesis 38:6-8

Always remember, the Devil can cite scripture, for a laugh. If you think that’s funny, try swallowing a bite of your child’s tender flesh as you fight your need to flee in terror from the sound of the wind rustling a dead leaf on a tree branch, punk.

Further reading:

Job 5:2
For wrath killeth the foolish man, and envy slayeth the silly one.

[1] from the final part of the great Leviticus 26:

36 “‘As for those of you who are left, I will make their hearts so fearful in the lands of their enemies that the sound of a windblown leaf will put them to flight. They will run as though fleeing from the sword, and they will fall, even though no one is pursuing them. 37 They will stumble over one another as though fleeing from the sword, even though no one is pursuing them. So you will not be able to stand before your enemies. 38 You will perish among the nations; the land of your enemies will devour you. 39 Those of you who are left will waste away in the lands of their enemies because of their sins; also because of their ancestors’ sins they will waste away.’”

more here

[2]

OK, you got me, I pulled that Victorian reference out of my ass, here’s the actual origin:

early 18th century: from French onanisme or modern Latin onanismus, from the name Onan (Gen. 38:9), who practiced coitus interruptus.

We brought out the worst in each other

I stand by my original comment.

“From when I asked you what was the reason for your final, fatal estrangement?”

Yeah, when I told you we brought out the worst in each other.

“Yeah, I remember when you said that, but I have to confess, I never really got that.”

I fucking shot the guy, twice.

“OK, but it seems clear you had no intent to actually kill him.”

I took a gun and shot my oldest amigo twice, once in the thigh, once in the kneecap. In the kneecap, because it’s supposed to be excruciatingly painful to be shot in the knee. I would say the worst in each of us had been brought out by that point.

“Not so, I beg to differ, not the worst, he didn’t bring out the worst in you (though you may well have brought out the worst in him). The worst would have caused you to shoot to kill, you would have blown his brains out or shot him twice in the gut, so he’d die slowly and in great agony like in the Westerns when somebody gets gut shot“

Well, sure, killing him would have been worse, in a strict sense the worst, but goddamn it, I shot a guy I’ve been friends with since we were ten years old. I would say we brought out the worst in each other, or, at the least, very bad things.

“As you admit, not the worst, bad, sure, very bad, but by your own admission, not the worst.”

Well, as Shakespeare has some poor devil say in King Lear, “as long as you can say it’s the worst, it’s not the worst.”

“Ah, you mean:

  • Edgar. [aside] O gods! Who is’t can say ‘I am at the worst’?
    I am worse than e’er I was.
  • Old Man. ‘Tis poor mad Tom.
  • Edgar. [aside] And worse I may be yet. The worst is not
    So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’ “

Yes, I lack your eidetic, photogenic memory.

“You mean my lightning fast google fingers.”

Yes, I’m sure that is what I mean.

“But anyway, I’m interested in hearing more of this ‘we brought out the worst in each other’ business.”

Well, shooting my old friend was about as bad as it got, and, of course, I only winged the guy, or crippled him I guess is more accurate, so I guess nothing really bad happened between us…

“No need to be snide, Clyde. Precision in language is important, as you know, being an officer of the court. Bringing out ‘bad enough’ in each other is far from bringing out the ‘worst'”

Is there a point to this exercise in semantics?

“Are you referring to lexical or conceptual semantics?”

Plain old school yard semantics.

“It’s just that you are in the habit of making wild claims you later are unable to back up, I’m trying to help you communicate more clearly and not contradict yourself.”

So to avoid contradiction, for you, I need to make it clear that we brought out very bad, dark, violent things in each other, that while shooting him was, admittedly, bad, and I spent two years on probation (talk about a good lawyer), we did not actually bring out the absolute ‘worst’ in each other, unless you consider that perhaps the worst I could do was shoot somebody I’ve known for years twice, deliberately, to cause maximum pain.

“No need to be so snippy about it, I’m just making a point.”

Snippy, you say, could you give me the lexical semantic etymology of that term of art?

“Snippy is a colloquial phrase, as you well know. It means short-tempered, snarky, bitten off with an overtone of hostility, as in snipping, or perhaps, nipping. I don’t think it’s fair to take it out on me if you habitually seek a pass, a poetic license, for speaking with imprecision.”

I made the point that we stopped being friends for good once I finally understood that we were in an eternal struggle, that there was no chance of coming to any understanding, that we were locked in a zero sum game for who had the right to be more disappointed by the other, whose anger and hostility was more justified. Our rotting cadaver of a friendship had by then become toxic, septic, it had to be put out of its misery for everyone’s good. My shorthand for all that, and my abiding belief, when pressed for a summary of the reason we are no longer friends, after almost half a century, is that we brought out the worst in each other. We had no empathy towards each other, to put it as mildly, and unsnippily as I can.

“Well, there’s no reason to be so fucking snide…”

Argumentative, your Honor!

“I’m not the one making floridly exaggerated claims.”

Floridly, you say, as in floridly psychotic, complete with the fragrant bouquet of hallucinations and addled brain full of false beliefs?

“Whatever… you know, for someone as smart as you are it’s kind of sad that you can’t have a simple intellectual disagreement with somebody without getting all bent out of shape and taking it out on the other person, charging me with being argumentative. You know argument is sport with me, and I can as easily argue your side of the debate as the side I am staunchly defending against you. Why do you take it so personally?”

I only take it personally, I suppose, because I am personally being subjected to this hectoring lecture on precision in language, over a heinous and painful thing I personally did to an old friend after years of escalating hostility. I personally have to defend myself against your sporty, fun ‘I get such a kick out of being contrary!’ inquisition, or maybe prosecution is more accurate, I have to check to see if my poetic license has expired or not.

“Jesus, you really are a fucking hard-ass. You can certainly dish out the punishment but you seem incapable of taking even a gentle push to make yourself more clear.”

The only way I could be more clear, at this point, is by going home, getting my legally possessed gun (great lawyer!) and pointing it at your fucking knee.

“Oh, you talk a good game, tough guy, but this would be a second offense and you’d do prison time.”

Not necessarily, not if I killed you and buried your body here, at this scenic spot where your carcass would never be found.

(He pulls a gun out of his backpack and clicks off the safety).

“You talk a good game, pal, but now that you’ve threatened to kill me, this would be self-defense, standing my ground in reasonable, or at least articulable, fear of deadly assault, here in the great state of Florida.”

We’re in Mississippi, friend.

“Same shit, different state motto”

Well, you might as well shoot me, but, not in the knee, please, for the love of God.

“Don’t worry about that, there is only one reason to shoot somebody, and it’s not to make him limp for the rest of his miserable life.”

Your clearheadedness is an inspiration to everybody in the Laughing Academy, sir.

“Oh, I’m the crazy one? On your knees, motherfucker.”

You shouldn’t use the ‘f-word’.

“Are you fucking mocking me?!”

Oy, I wouldn’t dream of it!

Hot Enough for ya?

These three stories were at the top of Saturday’s NY Times. The wealthy world is now also officially at risk from extreme weather, the Arctic is on fire and there is, we learn, a great demand for “water witches” who can locate ground water by divination.

Talk about doom scrolling, I hadn’t even scanned down to the explicitly political news about our nation’s widespread belief in a cabal of powerful Satanist pedophile cannibals in Hollywood and the Deep State and an insane former president poised to become Speaker of the House in 2022 (did you know the fucker does not even have to be a member of Congress to become Speaker, if his party drafts him in a majority vote? [1]) as Biden dithers with commissions to advise him about things that should already have been done (unpacking an ideologically stacked Supreme Court, prosecuting the organizers and inciters of the January 6 MAGA riot and the defenders of that riot) and makes powerful idealistic speeches attempting to touch the closed hearts of extremists bent on destroying him [2].

Oh, Speaker Trump’s first order of business (or he may simply keep his hand up Kevin McCarthy’s ass and have Kevin do it), once new districts are gerrymandered by state Republicans, creating new guaranteed seats, and the margin of victory for Democrats is suppressed by new laws made to combat fraud that never happened, and his party retakes the House in 2022? Impeach Biden and Harris (Speaker of the House is Number 3 in line, if president and vice president cannot serve — and don’t forget the precedent — facts don’t matter, proof don’t mean shit, impeachment is purely political). A maniacal plan, sure, but no crazier than an armed attack on the Capitol to stop the ceremonial final certification of votes that had been counted, recounted and certified by all states. No crazier than the continual denial of that riot we all saw many videos of.

But back to more reasonable news, news we can actually deal with before we all simply evaporate in unbearable heat. The earth’s climate is warming. It is largely caused by human pollution, as demonstrated during the early days of the pandemic lockdown, when few cars were driving anywhere and the air quality over large cities immediately began improving. Less carbon dioxide (and associated toxic gases and particles from the burning of fossil fuel) going into the atmosphere is better for breathing and essential for slowing the steady rise of global air and ocean temperatures, global warming. Global warming, of course, fuels droughts, floods, killer storms and so forth.

Not to be a slave to “cause and effect”, but this quick lessening of poison in the air while a few hundred million cars stayed parked strongly suggests there are things humans can do to help save the planet from the activities of other, very powerful humans.

Nothing to worry about, really, if you listen to those who profit most from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. These are merely sensationalistic headlines calculated to alarm people and distract them from the real agenda of eco-terrorism: to kill free enterprise and initiate American communism. It sure is convenient to blame the drowning deaths of twelve old people in a German nursing home (in a flood, whose fault is that?) on the industry that is literally making the world go round.

Check these three headlines out, from further down the NY Times home page, with the photo calculated to cause terror (the first is a repeat, about the wealthy also being in danger from climate catastrophe), making a big deal about natural occurrences that God Himself has caused:

Is this the only nation credulous enough to believe any repeated lie, no matter how many times it is directly contradicted by our own eyes, ears, experience, if it feeds into our suspicion that fucking bastards that we hate are getting over on us?

[1]

As the Constitution does not explicitly state that the speaker must be an incumbent member of the House, it is permissible for representatives to vote for someone who is not a member of the House at the time, and non-members have received a few votes in various speaker elections over the past several years.

source

[2]

Events are beginning to confirm the reasons so many of us were sickened when the leading Democratic presidential candidate was replaced, pursuant to the decision of Democratic party leaders and supported by several presidential candidates who all dropped out the same day and threw their support to Biden. Biden, who trailed in all polls and had won no primaries, was suddenly inserted as the presidential candidate we’d all hold our noses and vote for to get rid of the Orange Polyp.

“Moderates” like Biden are not the kind of leaders we need to face down an ongoing, organized, well-financed threat to democracy. They are by nature compromisers, the perfect foils for determined extremists on the other side. “Centrists” cave when things get too hot, looking to keep things pretty much the way they are while striving to change a few things that are really, really unjust. And while they deliberate, desperate men and women of action put their lives (or, more usually, other people’s lives) on the line to make sure those judicious deliberations don’t mean shit.